Motels a long-term concern

Nancy Ryan, Tribune staff reporterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The problem with Winthrop Harbor's motel strip, according to town leaders, is that people rarely check out.

Some of the motels--once popular for weekend getaways and frequently used by out-of-town workers at the now-shut nuclear power plant in Zion--have become single-room apartments that attract transients and the working poor.

As a result, the Village Board voted 4-2 this month to begin enforcement in November of a 20-year-old ordinance that restricts stays at motels to a maximum of 30 days. Some motel owners have called the measure excessively meddlesome.

"That's our business if people are living [in the motels] permanently," said Jafar Saiyed, owner of the Abode Motel, where almost 95 percent of his customers stay for long terms.

Village officials said the motel strip on Sheridan Road is zoned for business and motels operating more as residential dwellings are violating village law.

"These motels are substandard housing," Village Atty. Robert Long said. "A family with three kids trying to live in a one-room kitchenette is tantamount to a small slum."

Until a few years ago, the village rarely applied the law. But when the Zion plant closed in 1998, the motels lost most of their regular guests, according to owners and village trustees.

Since then three of the community's five motels--the Abode, the Harbor and the Skylark--have operated as single-room apartments, generally charging between $150 and $200 a week.

"There's no way these people could afford to rent an apartment," said Doyle Crowder, who for 15 years has owned the Skylark, where about 10 of its 15 rooms are occupied by long-term customers.

The motels have become a financial burden on the town, generating more calls for police and ambulances--by people without health insurance--than other multiunit dwellings, said Trustee Richard Robards, who supports increased enforcement.

Even more important, trustees say, is that, after staying for 30 days in one motel, the customers are considered residents under state law. That means they can send their children to local schools, which worry about overcrowding.

"The system is being used," said Trustee Gene Swindle, who still voted against enforcement earlier this month, saying it would hurt motel owners.

Housing advocates argue that most of the motel residents are stuck because they earn so little.

"I was living with my fiance, who was evicted from our place in Zion. I didn't know he wasn't paying the rent, and suddenly I was out on the street," said a 31-year-old woman who asked not to be named. She lives in a one-room Harbor Motel kitchenette with her three young children, her cousin and the cousin's 8-year-old girl.

A student at the College of Lake County, the woman and her cousin are paying $220 a week at the motel while they wait for an opening at a subsidized townhouse in Zion.

A 41-year-old man who works in a Libertyville factory said he moved into the Abode Motel from his Rolling Meadows home about two months ago because of marital problems. "I'm just waiting now," the man said. "I might move back to Rolling Meadows if my wife and I work things out."

Acknowledging the tough odds that the motel residents face in finding housing, Robards and the other trustees who supported enforcement decided the law only would be enforced with motel customers who move in after Nov. 1. Existing residents will not have to relocate.

According to advocates for the homeless, small motels across the Chicago suburbs are sometimes the only place the area's thousands of minimum-wage workers can find to live.

"We have a lot of $7-an-hour jobs, but we don't have any $7-an-hour housing," said Matthew Hanafee, executive director of the Elgin-based Illinois Coalition to End Homelessness. The group estimates the number of homeless in the Chicago suburbs at 56,000.

Scarce rental units are often out of reach, according to a study last month by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. A household earning $21,000 a year in the Chicago area can afford no more than $534 in monthly rent. A two-bedroom apartment in the area typically goes for $891 a month, the study found.

The cost of staying at the Harbor or the Abode is not much less than living in an apartment. But the motels do not require a deposit.

"The problem is they can't scrape together the deposit for an apartment," Robards said. "That's a big chunk of change."